How much ...

New York produces a steady stream of images that repeat the same formulas, and yet it defies that clichéd vision, as Walter Schels (b. 1936) surely also realized the moment he first set foot in the city. He had seen hundreds of photographs, yet when he finally came to see for himself in 1966, what he encountered did not feel familiar at all. Schels’s series “Transformations New York” captures its subject in abstract and highly graphical images. Skyscrapers seem transmuted into matrices or punch- card patterns, as though Manhattan’s true message had folded out of the two-dimensional surface of the picture into a hitherto unknown depth.